Nicolette Jones writes on the power of poetry for kids and reviews Nursery Rhymes With Pictures. This extract below was published in The Sunday Times on 22 September:
It is tempting to begin this piece
With lines of blank or unrhymed verse
Poetry of all kinds, but particularly free verse, is riding high in children’s books and stomping with its metrical feet through the book prizes. The 2024 winner of the annual Yoto Carnegie medal was the poet Joseph Coelho — his interweaving family drama and reworked Greek myth in The Boy Lost in the Maze was written in poetic forms from free verse to sestinas and villanelles. It was the third free-verse novel to win the Carnegie, after Sarah Crossan’s One in 2016 and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (about writing poetry) in 2019.
Meanwhile, poetry recitation is booming. The Poetry by Heart contest for schoolchildren, whose finalists recite in public at the Globe Theatre’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, involved 48,000 children who sent in 3,030 video entries from 1,600 schools this year. The next contest will be launched on National Poetry Day (Oct 3).
The success of these initiatives seems to go hand-in-hand with the rise of spoken word events and the enduring popularity of rap. They are perhaps also inspired in no small measure by prolific poets and former children’s laureates including Coelho, who visited a library in every region in the UK from 2019 to 2023 (213 altogether), and Michael Rosen, who has appeared at countless state schools and whose performances of his poems on his YouTube channel have been watched more than 142 million times.
Of course, poetry for children is not new, as everyone knows who was taught this particular ditty: “A child should always say what’s true/ And speak when he is spoken to/ And behave mannerly at table/ At least as far as he is able.” (Whole Duty of Children from RL Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885). Or “King John was not a good man/ He had his little ways” (AA Milne’s Now We Are Six, 1926). Or lines from, say, Walter de la Mare, Charles Causley or Eleanor Farjeon or from TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) — in some cases via Cats: the Musical.
Still, it is fair to say that for many a love of poetry begins with nursery rhymes, which have never gone out of fashion since their 18th-century golden age. The recent discovery by the author Robert Lacey of a largely forgotten illustrator has led to a reissue of Nursery Rhymes (Paper Argosies £20, 2-5) with pictures by Claud Lovat Fraser, known as the Vermillionaire because of his love of coloured inks. First published in 1919, this eclectic collection includes favourites such as Hey Diddle Diddle or I Had a Little Nut Tree, plus oddities and even poems by William Blake. The pictures, updated slightly by Ben Coppin, are bright, nostalgic treats of elegant penmanship and historical costumes.
Still, it is fair to say that for many a love of poetry begins with nursery rhymes, which have never gone out of fashion since their 18th-century golden age. The recent discovery by the author Robert Lacey of a largely forgotten illustrator has led to a reissue of Nursery Rhymes (Paper Argosies £20, 2-5) with pictures by Claud Lovat Fraser, known as the Vermillionaire because of his love of coloured inks. First published in 1919, this eclectic collection includes favourites such as Hey Diddle Diddle or I Had a Little Nut Tree, plus oddities and even poems by William Blake. The pictures, updated slightly by Ben Coppin, are bright, nostalgic treats of elegant penmanship and historical costumes.
Nursery Rhymes with Pictures by Claud Lovat Fraser, edited by Robert Lacey and illustrated by Ben Coppin, is published by Paper Argosies on 3 October 2024, £20.
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